Is nature good for you?

And, if so, what kind of nature counts? Like many of us, I live in a small suburban unit with a backyard the size of a postage stamp. While this is arguably a good urban design for minimising biodiversity impacts (see ‘Building bird-friendly cities’ on page 8), there is mounting concern that our modern urban […]

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Planning for biodiversity and development in the urban fringe Biodiversity near and within urban areas brings many benefits but its maintenance involves complex trade-offs between competing land uses. We recently demonstrated how these trade-offs can be better described to facilitate more transparent, efficient and democratically derived urban planning (Bekessy et al. 2012)

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A checklist of the basics Population viability analysis (PVA) is a model-based protocol for characterising and predicting future fluctuations in a species’ abundance. PVA is a potentially powerful tool for predicting a species’ response to natural and anthropogenic impacts and for evaluating management options in terms of their contribution to a species’ long-term persistence. PVA […]

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How should we grow Australia’s cities to minimize their biodiversity impacts? Should we build our cities up or out? That’s the question we asked when we considered the challenge of how a growing city can retain its wildlife. While it’s unrealistic to believe city living can co-exist with a full complement of biodiversity, we wondered […]

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Road crossings and their value for wildlife People need roads – whether it’s to travel across the country or nick down to the local shops. Unfortunately, roads – especially big ones – come with a high cost for many species of wildlife. For many animals, roads are big, noisy, sometimes lethal barriers. They cut through […]

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Beyond the patch and across the landscape Here’s a lofty goal – the 2012 United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development endorsed a target to restore, by 2020, 150 million ha of disturbed and degraded land globally (see ‘That’s a big patch). Although such initiatives can be transformative because of their scope and backing, they […]